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My brother had to declare bankruptcy because of medical bills. He had to have emergency surgery - add on ambulance, ER bill, two weeks in the hospital, continuing medical care, not being able to work for a month...

He'd have ended up on the street during his recovery but one of his doctors and his husband opened their home to my brother to recuperate. (We live on the other side of the country, which is why he didn't stay with us.)

seriously the idea of ambulances and such costing money is so weird to me (im canadian) we just pay taxes here and there and you present your healthcare card and boom! you get healed for nothing (well you could say taxes but i dont really care)

Well Connor, if you agree to a healthcare system where you pay taxes, and in return receive healthcare...then you are a socialst communist nazi who drinks baby tears and spits on the Constitution.

I have heard from the pretty blondes on TV that American healthcare is THE best in the world! If I'm not paying $5,000 for an MRI that costs $250 in the UK, then god dammit I don't wanna live anywhere else!

As a new zealander I find the idea of living in a country with health care like americas scary. People here often joke about america is so unsafe to live in because of the gun control issues & health care problems, oh also how often you guys sue each other. The general idea is that america is like here except everyone is out for themselves.

Well to be honest that's kind of what our founding fathers wanted, they just never realized that corruption of he government would contribute to the problem so much, and not to mention the unprecedented issues like healthcare. They wanted what we have right now, in theory, without all the gov problems of course.

I'm actually 'murican you god damn FRENCHIE (jk, love you guys) but cameron has publicly made a ton of promises not to mess with health care too much, but he is at the same time selling all the tests that can be done at a profit off to private companies which makes the NHS seem like a massive money sink as they can only do the unprofitable and costly treatments which hurts the balance books while the contractors under the flag of the NHS are making the money, so it appears that it is a massive money sink, which could lead to some actually public support for its dismantling, even if it is just a trick in the books.

Sadly, the first figure is not entirely true. There always has been a (tiny) push to add private healthcare from the "entrepreneurs" side. It is a big market - even in Canada, the idea of mixed healthcare always pops up from time to time; indicating wait times as an issue.

Although, honestly in Canada if you have the money, most people just go south to address it in a timely manner. So, it hasn't yet materialised but in places where that might not be possible - it does lead a small minority to actually want private healthcare.

Canadian here as well. A decade ago, I suffered a badly shattered right femur in a brutal car accident. I have a titanium rod and metal plates and screws holding it together today. My leg was brilliantly repaired and is perfectly fine now (I truly don't notice any difference between it and my "good" left leg at all). It cost me a grand total of $7.50 for my surgery, hospital stay and rehab, and the only reason I had to pay $7.50 is because on my last day in hospital, I didn't like the food they brought to my hospital room for me, so I grabbed a pair of crutches and my friend and I went down to the cafeteria, where I had to actually pay for my food out of my own pocket. Gotta love Canada's health care system! I don't even want to know what that kind of injury - emergency surgery, hospital stay, and rehab/after-care - would have cost me in the USA, but I imagine it would have resulted in me having to declare bankruptcy!

Our system is certainly not perfect, but I am IMMENSELY appreciative of what we have, and those from America who knock Canada's Health Care system have no clue just how bad they really have it. The fact is that I, like all Canadians, pay a little bit more in taxes every year because of our Health Care system, but that increased tax is not nearly the amount that the average American pays in health care insurance coverage per annum!

A few years ago, the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), ran this contest called "The Greatest Canadian", where citizens across the country got to vote on who we considered to be "The Greatest Canadian" in history. Now, some might think we would have chosen someone like Alexander Graham Bell, or in a hockey-mad country like this, maybe Wayne Gretzky?

Nope! Instead, Canadians picked a guy named Tommy Douglas as the winner. Who was Tommy Douglas you ask? Well, he was the politician who, back in the 1960s, created our nation's Universal Health Care System! Canadians are well aware of how good we have it, and let me tell you, in comparison to what our friends south of our border have to deal with in regards to medical treatment, we don't just have it good - we have it great! Or, more accurately, Americans have it really, really bad!

I have a friend who broke his ankle last weekend; needed to have it screwed back together--roughly commensurate with your injury, I think. He has insurance, but for some reason it's only valid in another state, so his surgery cost $30,000.

It cost me a grand total of $7.50 for my surgery, hospital stay and rehab, and the only reason I had to pay $7.50 is because on my last day in hospital, I didn't like the food they brought to my hospital room for me

It cost me a grand total of $7.50 for my surgery, hospital stay and rehab

Good friend of mine was diagnosed with cancer, he caught it early, and it was operable. However he didn't have insurance. He managed to sell, buy, trade goods, work overtime at work and scrape together 30,000 for his surgery and related expenses. This was done at a teaching hospital and they cut him a deal given the situation. It's safe to say that your incident would run 100k in the US. Emergency trauma surgery and related recovery expenses would easily run that. That would be bankruptcy for most people.

New Zealander here. Similar story, I had a car accident at night and broke my right femur. Got 40min ambulance to the hospital. Ambulance had morphine otherwise they would have got the rescue helicopter. Had surgery the next day to have a titanium rod inserted. A couple of days later I walked out of the hospital on crutches. Total cost to myself: $0

We have socialised healthcare but accidents are actually covered under a different system by ACC as a no-fault insurer. ACC is paid with different levies by everyone. e.g. levy included in the price of fuel

I was fortunate to be able to live there a for a few years and I have to say the level of care was the same as in the USA, but I didn't wind up with a huge medical bill in the end.

And I wasn't "taxed to death" either. On average I only paid about $40 more a month in taxes than I did in the USA (working for the same company as well).

I would much rather pay $40 a month extra and never have to worry about getting a huge bill in the mail and face possible bankruptcy because the insurance provider decided not to cover the procedure, AFTER I already had it done.

I read somewhere sketchy so don't hold me against this, but it's like the USA spends 17.9% of GDP on Healthcare and it doesn't cover everyone (like 60 percent?)
UK spends 9.3% of GDP and Covers everyone.

I think the greatest thing is you're not thinking "what if it's nothing and I have to shell out on my insurance" in the UK. meaning that GP prescriptions will stop things like lung or chest infections developing into more serious conditions = more money to be spent.
if I ever did somehow make it into American Politics this would be the sole thing I'd try to educate people on.

I would love if the Redditors who see this comment go to the OECD website here and select the United States as the country of reference.

Select Canada as the country of comparison and go for "health". After you plug around a whole bunch of things it starts to become pretty apparent that when comparing the Canadian and United States healthcare systems; Canada is on top in about 70% of categories.

Now, after you're done all of that i'd like you to go to this info-graphic, spending.

So, if I make $75K (USD per year), In the US I pay $11,612.35 in federal income tax, assuming I take the standard deduction. Add to that 6.2% (4,650) in FICA, and .9% (675) in Medicare tax, and the grand total is $16,937.35

In Canada, that same salary (in USD) would get me a tax bill of $12,012.87; 40% lower than in the USA.

I broke my wrist mountain biking in the spring. I worried about the wait time, how long I would have to be off work, and how long it would be before I could get back to biking. The thought of how much it would cost never crossed my mind. As slow as the Canadian health care can be, at least I don't have to worry about the cost when I need it.

EDIT: I had the option between a cast or surgery. There was no talk about cost for either, just rick vs reward for both (I went with surgery and now have a permanent screw in my wrist)

Should never fail to mention, slow for a banged up wrist. Non-threatening injuries are lower priority so that critical things like heart attacks get seen immediately. As a Canadian, I'm okay waiting 5 hours for a cast so that uncle Bob can live through the night

The thing is, it is NOT significantly faster in the American system, the difference is in America we dont tell you to wait. Ever had to wait in a lobby for an appointment? That is considered wait time as well... but a lot of people refuse to accept that

You also don't have to worry about the job you have and whether you'll be fired and without healthcare. To me, this is the real reason companies don't want UHC in the US. Employees are afraid to quit even when the conditions are terrible, in Canada our HC has nothing to do with our employment.

Source: A guy who had a great job at a TV station when he was still in highschool and left it when he was 25 to go freelance.

MRIs are less than $100 in Japan. The Japanese have the highest life expectancy and the lowest infant mortality rate. In general the Japanese also perform very few surgeries; it is more of a last-resort sort of thing.

As far as the bankruptcies thing goes; most are from medical bills and most of those people had some kind of health insurance when they initially became ill. Obamacare has tried to reduce this by eliminating lifetime caps on insurance and shitty policies that don't actually cover anything.

Also, let's not forget about the "spending down" phenomenon that is common in older folks. Medicare doesn't really cover long-term care and neither does private insurance. Older folks then intentionally or unintentionally go bankrupt in order to qualify for medicaid which does pay for long-term care.

Nursing home type care costs something like 90 grand a year with full medical support. Most older folks make something like 25 grand a year in the USA.

Many Americans seem to subscribe to the "fuck you, I got mine" line of thought. Note that I'm not saying all Americans do; I personally know several who are similarly left-leaning (although what I consider a moderately left wing would probably be seen as radical leftist thinking in the States.)

As a freedom-hating socialist who lives in an opressive nanny state, I'm more than happy to pay taxes that go towards free health care, welfare and free higher education.

No, you're 100% right. I think that most Americans don't care unless it personally affects them. That's one of the reasons why you don't see as much outrage over NSA spying and other Constitutional rights violations.

It seems liek common sense that if you pay taxes, it should go towards healthcare, social programs, free higher education...ESPECIALLY when you realize how much money we waste on war, empire, military, corporate welfare, etc. However, the propaganda is extremely powerful here.

hell, i'd pay 60-70% income tax if it meant we had solid, well established, and properly regulated social programs that covered things like electric, internet, medical costs, some recreation, transportation, etc.

"Then you think it's okay to STEAL my hard earned money and give it to those LAZY bums that don't WANT to work. It's entitlements that are ruining this country! You just want something for FREE!" I live in Texas. There's just no actual debate with these people.

The fact you have to "debate" basic human decency shows me how broken the American system is. I have lived in countries where people are fine with their taxes going to help society in general...in the US it's all "MY MONEY MY MONEY MY MONEY". For all the talk about how great of a nation it is, it is a selfish and greedy place. And what's worse is instead of facing their problems people get all pissy and personally insulted since they happened to be born there....and act like they have some honor to defend over something they neither built or caused.

I think part of the issue is that the only time we hear about social programs in the United States it's about how corrupt and inefficient they are. So people don't really believe their money is going to anything useful and therefore have no desire to give it up.

When you consider that when you combine federal, state, and municipal taxes a lot of people in the US are paying similar tax levels to some socialist countries. However, they aren't actually seeing any of those benefits so you can see why people start to develop those beliefs.

I concur. For some it's the "lazy bums getting muh moneyz!" attitude, but the bulk of the reticence is really just that people don't believe that our government can do it very well. It's all well and good to say "but look, Canada can do it!", but that's the Canadian government, not ours.

We have the problem of the GOP claiming that governemnt is the problem, the programs are broken, nothing the government does will work well, etc. Then the GOP gets into power, fucks things up, lose government control to the Dems, and convince people that their point is proven because everythign IS fucked up, and government isn't functioning...they just don't mentioned that it was the GOP that fucked it up in the first place. Then the GOP gets elected again, and continue to chip away, and the cycle repeats itself.

It also doesn't help that in this country we have only two political parties with a chance to win an election: a center right (Dems) and a far right (GOP). There is no real diversity of thought between the two, with the exception of the Dems actually allow for a few crumbs to reach those beneath the table, and the GOP allows nothing.

U.S. citizens pay more in per capita taxes for their healthcare system than any other country does. it's certainly not a question of greediness and selfishness. The U.S. scores quite highly on any measure of charitable giving and generosity.

it is pure selfishness. the entire attitude is " i worked for my money, why can [random stranger] just come along and take it? but wait! a charity is giving to [emotional appeal]? ok, well i get tax deductions and social karma for that, so it's i'll just give them some change and call it even."

Pure selfishness by who? You haven't addressed the reality that American citizens pay more in taxes for healthcare than anyone else, and that the U.S. spends more on healthcare than any other country.

Why are you not selfish? is it because you happen to live in another country? Do you even make enough money to pay any taxes there? Or does just living there make you super-enlightened and special and superior to anyone else? Posting your political theories on reddit doesn't make you a good person and it doesn't help anyone get medical care, or their next meal.

Actually, pointing out the insanity of our broken system and talking about it openly is very much helping society in the long run. Since everyone here tends to stick their fingers in their ears as soon as you suggest that we are all getting fucked by selfish conservative politics aimed at making a small percentage of citizens filthy rich while bankrupting those who happen to get sick, talking openly is the first step to change those medieval practices.

I absolutely agree. What's stranger is that these people are also the most religious, typically. The same people that tell me how terrible my sexual orientation is tell me that "charity shouldn't be forced, it should be left to the church". I just can't understand such contrived values.

Then there's the patriots, ex military who benefit from government healthcare and free tuition because of their service and condemn higher taxes for healthcare because they "earned" theirs. Seems it's great to force taxes for decades of war to blow people up, and to give to those who do the killing, but want those benefits for the greater good of the country itself and suddenly you're a freedom hating thief.

American here. You are absolutely correct, unfortunately. In the US is is so unfashionable to be poor all the poor people do is ridicule other poor people and hold those with money up as fucking heros. Not everyone mind you but it seems that the loudest very often espouse that set of beliefs. We live in a lottery society. Wealth is visible, just out of reach yet tantalisingly close. Everyone thinks they can and should be rich so they protect the rights of the wealthy thinking that it is only a matter of time before they join their ranks. The same people scream about how we are a Christian nation. I often wonder how they deal with the cognitive dissonance.

I once heard a super hardcore conservative in Britain say "Well, if that makes me a communist, well, then I guess that makes me a communist." And nobody went "OMG! TAE HUMANITY!!! FACES MELTING OFF IN SUPERNATURAL FIRE ALL AROUND!!!"

Fair enough. I suppose you have to define the goal of a system before you can say it's broken. if the goal of the system is to make money for big medicine and pharma at the expense of the health and well being of the American people, then it's working like gangbusters.

Because people don't realize or don't believe that it could happen to them, or else are just happy to have health care and are afraid they'll lose it (or have to pay for it themselves instead of getting it through work) if they complain.

Because in America it has been a slow build. Back in 1993 we were told that we needed it, but Hilarycare was shot down. Bolstered by their win and protected by a Republican majority in congress, health insurance companies went wild, jacking up rates, reducing benefits, weeding out those with pre-existing condition no matter how minor (acne?), cancelling policies when people had the nerve to try to use them. As more and more people saw disaster happen to friends, neighbors, co-workers, or experienced first hand in their own families, it reached the point where they elected by a wide margin a candidate for president who pledged to do something about it, and then re-elected him when he pledged to fight to keep it.

So people didn't march in the streets, they protesed in a manner that was far more effective - they elected candidates who would do what they were elected to do.

Does anyone have a link to the actual study? I'm interested in if medical bills = bills for treatment or if medical bills = bills that have become unpayable due to a medical reason (such as being unable to work due to health). Obviously, the former can be included in the later.

So Table 2 on page 3 shows that its not 60% due to medical bills but 60% due to medical reasons (which can include medical bills). 29% stated it was directly medical bills and 40.3% had income loss due to health. The researchers defined that anyone who declared bankruptcy due to medical bills, had medical bills >10% of income or 5,000$ or had to mortgage their home to pay for medicine had medical bill problems which came to 57.1%.

This is a very controversial study. If you dig enough they also mention that gambling bankrupcies counted, because gambling addiction is a medical problem. While this number is small, it is ammo against this study.

In addition the title is misleading, they found that number to be caused by medical problems, not necessarily medical bills. So it could be a combination of bills and inability to work, or reduced productivity, which is still an issue many people think we should be addressing.

You raise an important point that should be emphasized: not all of them cite medical bills as the cause for their bankruptcy (29% do, as you said). 10% more said the bankruptcy was medically related. That leaves 61% who did not cite medical bills or medical problems as a reason for bankruptcy (the remaining 22% are those that were included in the loss of income category, presumably - the numbers don't add up cleanly but then many of the categories are not mutually exclusive).

It's still quite compelling data. And I suppose a case could be made that some of the folks who lost income due to health reasons might have gotten preventive care if their insurance were better, although that would be tough to quantify in a study.

This was up here month ago. I read it then it's a misleading article and somewhat bogus study $5000 in medical bill qualified you for a medical bk. I work in a bankruptcy office maybe 2% of our clients file bankruptcy for medical reasons. It's mostly people who don't know how to budget and get behind on credit cards, Lose a job, or are unable to pay their mortgage.

edit: On top of that most people who get sick and can't work will need a BK regardless of the cost of the medical bills. You can't pay rent and eat if you're not getting a paycheck.

what qualifed for a medical bk:
2001
study, which designated as “medically
bankrupt” debtors citing illness
or medical bills as a specific
reason for bankruptcy; OR reporting
uncovered medical bills $1000 in the past 2 years; OR
who lost at least 2 weeks of work-related income due to
illness/injury; OR who mortgaged a home to pay medical
bills. Debtors who gave no answers regarding reasons for
their bankruptcy were excluded from analyses.
For all other analyses (ie, those not reporting time trends)
we adopted a definition of medical bankruptcy that utilizes
the more detailed 2007 data. We altered the 2001 criteria to
include debtors who had been forced to quit work due to
illness or injury. We also reconsidered the question of how
large out-of-pocket medical expenses should be before
those debts should be considered contributors to the family’s
bankruptcy. Although we needed to use the threshold
of $1000 in out-of-pocket medical bills for consistency in
the time trend analyses, we adopted a more conservative
threshold—$5000 or 10% of household income—for all
other analyses. Adopting these more conservative criteria
reduced the estimate of the proportion of bankruptcies due
to illness or medical bills by 7 percentage points.

TL;DR The study was more about the illness causing the bankruptcy due to loss of work and other contributing factors then medical bills.

This why we filed for bankruptcy. We had insurance, but I had an emergency C-section, and my daughter was on full life support for two days in the NICU with a full time nurse, specialists, outside consults, and a whole array of tests and sending the tests for outside opinions.

When there is the life of your child you ask nothing of cost, you tell them to do do everything they can.

They did, and we took her off life support and she died in my arms. She was alive for three days.

When we did our bankruptcy our ratio of debt was 5% consumer and 95% medical debt.

One thing of interest is that at least 50% of insurance companies canceled the policy within a year of a major debilitating illness, and it would have been impossible to get new insurance with a preexisting condition.

This was 2009, when this article was written. Happily, some laws regarding health care have changed since then and these numbers should be coming down.

I am a free marketeer. I go to one of the most libertarian leaning economics schools in the country but I cannot help but to think that healthcare should be a human right.

I think as a society we should make the commitment to take care of each other's health regardless of the economic inefficiencies that this may cause. I strongly believe having the rich and poor getting the same health treatment is one of the greatest signs of equality and fairness.

I know this might be a little too late, but honestly, this company can try to help. They will review your bills, make sure you aren't getting charged too much, they will try to see if the bills can be lowered, and will be your advocate in this situation.

My wife works for this company, and every person, from the top to the bottom, has a passion for changing the healthcare situation in the US.

Made me chuckle. But honestly, with bills you have to look and make sure you aren't being charged twice for any item, make sure that they didn't run something under the wrong code, make sure that insurance processed everything correctly, make sure you aren't being charged out-of-network if you were in-network, and a list of other things. Everyone is human, and they will make errors (especially with how convoluted the whole system is) and you have to watch them like a hawk.

Hospitals will regularly charge $30 for a single ibuprofen pill...they will issue unnecessary CAT scans and the like for 2-3,000 bucks a pop. Why? Because they can.

Did you know the medical industry (hospitals, pharma companies, and insurance co's) lobbies our lawmakers THREE TIMES as much as the defense industry per year? As these companies line the pockets of lawmakers, friendly legislation is passed by those same lawmakers to make it easier to gouge patients and charge unfair, monopolistic prices.

It's a perfect example of the negative results of a lack of citizen participation in our democracy. Since the average Joe is too complacent/ignorant to lift a finger, the only interested party remaining is the medical lobby. Thus, all laws are tailored to their interests and desires, since no opposing voice spoke up (or more importantly, lined the pockets of lawmakers in DC).

People are always asking "why isn't our healthcare as good as other developed countries?" They seem to ask this with the assumption that our gov't is actually INTERESTED in providing us with the best healthcare possible, but some mysterious, obstinate force of American nostalgia holds us back. This is false.

The US gov't has been handsomely paid off to assist these Med companies in extorting and robbing desperate American taxpayers in their times of personal health crisis. They know the people will have no choice but to pay up, and will have no clue how to change the broken system afterwards.

This is the most widespread robbery (and one of the largest tranfers of wealth) in human history. Wonder where the gargantuan wealth gap in the US comes from? THIS. It's time to stand up to these heartless companies and lawmakers. Obamacare was more of the same.

If you get sick in America sell your house, move into an apartment, downgrade your cars and hide your money anywhere but at a bank. Enjoy your last years to the fullest and pay the absolute minimum you can get away with and still get medical treatment. This is the new retirement plan for America.

I'm referring to the older generation mainly. I watched my father die slowly and rack up over $500,000 in medical debt and lose everything he ever worked for and leave us nothing. He never got to retire on top of all that. House, savings, car all gone.
He had a good job too. He worked his ass off.

Here is the academic article the Reuters piece is citing: Himmelstein, Thorne, Warren and Woolhandler (2009). Sen. Elizabeth Warren is one of the authors on the piece -- consumer bankruptcy was one of the big things she cut her teeth on as an academic. For those interested in the academics behind the piece, here's some of the background.

The method section of the paper (Himmelstein et al):

We surveyed a random national sample of 2314 bankruptcy filers in 2007, abstracted their court records, and interviewed 1032 of them. We designated bankruptcies as “medical” based on debtors' stated reasons for filing, income loss due to illness, and the magnitude of their medical debts.

The argument against Himmelstein et al. by Dranove and Millenson essentially boils down to: the cause of the bankruptcy is not inherently medical debts for most of the sample, rather it is many of the other expenditures / adverse shocks they face. The reason they believe this is relevant is that they argue a national health care system would not necessarily alleviate the bankruptcy problem as much as Himmelstein and co. argue.

Himmelstein et al.'s response is quite strong: they state that Dranove and Millenson misinterpret their data and are willfully ignoring much of their results.

I know our healthcare system sucks, but I see articles like this a lot and always wonder if medical bills were the reason, or if they were just a contributing factor. They never actually say. My guess is that it's the latter.

The new figure of 62 percent has also been criticized. Aparna Mathur, a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, wrote that the Himmelstein survey "clearly states that only 29 percent of the respondents believed that their bankruptcy was actually caused by medical bills," and that the authors used their own criteria to label bankruptcies as medical. Marthur authored a separate paper that that came up with a much lower figure, saying that "nearly 27 percent of filings are a consequence of primarily medical debt, while in approximately 36 percent of cases medical debts co-exist with primarily credit card debts."

While your comment is somewhat on point in that there are usually many things that lead to bankruptcy such as poor money management before a catastrophe, the article suggests that medical bills were at least a large factor.

The article mentions that 92% of families that filed had a bill of more than $5,000. While it is very possible to have a savings that large, $5,000 is a considerable amount of cash to suddenly lose if you are not planning for it. Additionally it mentions that the average diabetic paid aprox. $27,000 in 2007 which would crush the majority of families pretty much no matter how you slice it.

However, I think the thing that is most suggestive of medical expenses being THE versus A contributing factor is that medical specific bankruptcies increased 50% from 2001 to 2007. This is a little muddled by a shaken economy, but that sort of increase is far above I what I believe can be explained by that alone.

5,000 isn't even a 'crazy' amount. A family member of mine wracked up 60,000 dollars in medical bills after a bad accident, staying in the hospital 9 days and out of work 2 months. That amount would easily bankrupt the average american family if their insurance wouldn't pay/they didn't have any and if they didn't have any sick leave.

Yep, I just like using the more conservative figures first in discussion as a show that I'm not trying to skew or "win" the discussion. I think keeps the talk a bit more honest and neutral.

If I were trying to sway the argument I definitely would have used my family's personal experience. We were "lucky" as my mother had very good health insurance, but when my younger sister was treated for Hodgekin's lymphoma a few years back she easily had over $500,000 in medical bills over the course of both rounds of treatment. There was one cocktail injection that she had every day for a month that ran $5,000 a pop.

My husbands diabetes is untreated because of this. He used to get treatment for it but we got so far behind on bills that we did actually have to file bankruptcy. The money we paid out of pocket plus the outrageous ER bill when he was diagnosed just sank us.

I feel the same way. I also wish there was more information provided on exactly what kind of insurance coverage they had. People use this kind of statistic to show you that even having health insurance isn't enough to stop you from being forced to file, but it could have been completely the opposite.

What if you have a terribly cheap plan meant only to cover some of the worst case stuff, but you then break your leg. Thats not a minor injury, but it wouldn't trigger any amazing benefits. Then something else happens and you can't pay the bill you have, and things snowball.

The first reaction to things like this is "but they had insurance" well, everyone chooses the level of risk they are comfortable with and risk has a funny way of not always going your way.

There has been more than one study, actually. In the first one, anything over $1000 in medical bills was considered "medically caused" even if the person had hundreds of thousands in other debt. In this one, the cutoff appears to have been $5000, which is still disingenous if you don't know how that compares to the rest of the person's debt overall. One study included "gambling addiction" as a "medical cause" , so gambling debts were rolled in as medical costs!!

Frankly, these studies were thoroughly political and done to prompt lawmakers to do something about the problem.

So, if I remember correctly, didn't this study conclude that any bankruptcy that included any medical debt was a bankruptcy due to "medical expenses"?

Don't get me wrong, our healthcare system needs a lot of work, but I'd really appreciate some unbiased statistics to see the problem in a clear light. I'm going to view someone with $1000 of medical debt and $50000 of other debt differently.

This is misleading and gets reposted all the time.
The study said medical bills were a factor in, not the main cause. From the last time.

That study is extremely dubious and has been much criticized. Only 29% of the people who responded to the survey actually said that medical bills were the reason for the bankruptcy. That 62% number means that one of several criteria was met: the person said it was the reason (29%), or the person filed for bankruptcy and had $5,000 in uncovered medical bills, or the person filed for bankruptcy and missed 2+ weeks of work/income due to medical problems, or the person filed for bankruptcy and mortgaged their house to pay medical bills. The majority of the people had medical problems, couldn't work, and filed for bankruptcy. In other words, it was the loss of income, not the medical expenses.
Also, it includes in "medical" such things as gambling problems, so if you're a chronic gambler with $5,000+ in debt who filed for bankruptcy, then you fit the criteria. Addictions count also, so if you're an alcoholic or a drug addict who had to miss 2+ weeks of income and filed for bankruptcy, then you fit the criteria. And who knows what criteria was used for the 8% in 1981 figure. It's just says it's an estimate based on some book.

I'm sick of healthcare. I'm sick of working my ridiculous job just to have health insurance. I can't do it anymore. That’s it, no more, I’m not going to work today. I’m going to wake up nice and early, take a shower, go downstairs, I’ll make my coffee like I always do, and while the coffee is brewing I’m going to take my dog Steve for a little walk, and then I’ll come back, drink my coffee, I’ll eat my breakfast, and then I’ll just sit there and wait.

And finally my phone’s going to ring, I’ll pick it up, “Hello?” “Rob, it’s your boss. Where are you? It’s eleven thirty. You’re fifteen minutes late. Lunch service is going to start soon. I want you in here now.” And I’m just going to say, “Sorry boss, but the answer is no.” Click.

And maybe he’ll try calling me back, I don’t know, maybe he won’t. I’ll still answer it. I’m not rude like that. Everybody’s always texting anyway, and so I’m always interested in hearing another person’s voice, even if it’s only my boss, calling just to make sure that he heard me correctly the first time. “That’s right boss,” I’ll confirm that he did hear me correctly, “I’m done.”

My wife’s going to get so pissed. “You just quit your job? What’s wrong with you? How are we going to pay any of the bills?” and I’ll just take it all in stride, enjoying my coffee, thinking about all of the free time I’m about to have, to really just sit back and enjoy, and I’ll tell this to my wife, I’ll say, “Honey, think about all of the time we’ll have now to spend with each other, you should do it too, just stop showing up for work and do the same thing.”

So she’ll calm down eventually and when she does, she’s going to definitely see it my way. Maybe her job won’t call her up for a few days. Maybe they’ll just say to themselves, “Huh, this isn’t like her at all. I’m sure she has a perfectly good explanation as to why she hasn’t shown up for work all week.” And she will. The explanation being, “My husband and I aren’t playing this game anymore. Done. Done-zo. No more work. Find somebody else to transfer line two to accounts payable. We’re done.”

And the bills might pile up, sure, and eventually the cell phone service is going to get cut off, and, yeah, it’ll take a while, but the city will eventually file all of that paperwork and that judge will order the marshals to forcibly evict us from our home and, whatever, that’ll take some time. Maybe something lucky will happen before we get the boot. Maybe we’ll open our arms to the universe and the universe will open its arms right back, that warm universal embrace you always see people posting about on Facebook.

Sure, we’d run out of food, eventually, but again, that wouldn’t be for a long while, because we have so many cans of tuna, so many packets of dried pasta and beans. One time I read about this lady who survived a whole winter trapped in some house only eating an apple a day. She went crazy and didn’t make it out alive, but I don’t think it was the hunger that did her in, that’s the point I was trying to make.

Actually, that’s a little morbid, maybe, we’ll run away before they kick us out, before the credit cards get cut off, we’ll find some commune somewhere, something a little culty but just slightly, nothing dangerous, none of that weird group ritual stuff like you see on TV, just something in the middle of nowhere where everybody farms and maybe gets together at night around a big communal campfire and they sing songs and pass around some old guitar that one of the older members brought from when he left his life back behind, and maybe there won’t be a B string, but we’ll make due, humming and singing along to stripped down bare-bones versions of all of our favorite nineties alt-rock hits.

And whoever winds up moving into our abandoned home, back here, back in our future-old life, or our current life, they’ll still get notices from all of the credit card companies and cell phone providers and cable companies all with variations of the same message, “Pay up.” And you know how bill collectors are. They try to collect a bill. They can or they can’t. If they can’t, they sell it to somebody else for a little less, somebody who might be a little better at collecting. The more times it gets sold, the better the collector, but also the more dangerous, the crazier, the ones really willing to take those extra risks to collect. And so these new tenants will get all sorts of threatening letters, knocks on the door in the middle of the night, “Pay up you deadbeats!” written on a note wrapped around a brick and left outside the front door, the message here being, next time maybe we’ll throw this through the window. Or maybe we won’t, but the next level of debt collectors that we’ll be forced to sell your debt to, they’re definitely going to throw it through your window, and maybe it’ll be on fire.

Enough of that harassment, enough bills, enough of this modern world, it’s all enough to make anybody want to skip town for a while, to get away, to go live on some commune somewhere, whatever, I’ll even take a crazy cult commune, even though I said I’d prefer something a little on the normal side, it’s not like these communes advertise on the Internet, and so if you’re looking for one, you just take it, because what are your chances that you’ll find another one any time soon, before your supply of tuna runs out, and those dried beans, you didn’t really think about eating them on the road, how hard it would be to find a stove, somewhere to boil them for a long enough time to where they’re tender, palatable, and so, yeah, you probably should have bought canned beans. But canned tuna, canned beans, do you know how demoralizing that can be, eating everything out of a can, every day, meal after meal, regardless of what’s inside, it always has a touch of that can taste, like something metal, like something that’s been in there for a long time.

Exactly what makes the ACA (Obamacare) a shit piece of legislation. It's great that poor people have health insurance, but it doesn't address the real problem: healthcare corruption on a massive scale.

I worked for a major health insurance company in the US. I worked in IT but we had a department whose job it was to figure out ways to deny insurance claims... I quit working there after I realized they were having us implement these horrible tricks and rules into the system... Now I work in telecom, but am now hating this field as well since I know I'm helping the NSA spy on us. Fuck!

If medical insurance wasn't such a requirement in America, I would have traveled throughout the entire country working odd jobs and living out some of my dreams. But instead I had to take a local job that I hated just so I didn't live under the crushing fear of getting cancer and then losing my entire future.

"Using a conservative definition, 62.1 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical; 92 percent of these medical debtors had medical debts over $5,000, or 10 percent of pretax family income," the researchers wrote.

$5000 or 10% of income seems kind of low to declare bankruptcy for. How are they determined to be medical bankruptcies?

The health care system in this country is so very fucked up. Just this month I was caught in a situation where I switched jobs in October, my new insurance doesn't kick in til January. By the time the option to get COBRA insurance had lapsed I found myself in a situation where I have been having terrible unexplained heart palpitations. I went to the ER ($3600 USD for a blood test and an EKG) and nothing was found wrong. I got sent to a cardiologist who recommended getting an echocardiogram test performed to find any abnormalities or problems with my heart. I arranged the appointment and was told that after any deductions for self pay....the grand total just for the test was an additional $2100 up front....otherwise they would not perform the procedure. Thank God I was able to pay it (barely)....but these motherfuckers were totally willing to just say NO and let me die...they did not give 2 shits.

HEALTH CARE SHOULD NOT BE A FUCKING FOR_PROFIT ENTERPRISE....IT SHOULD BE A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT

That sucks, but what's going to happen in the future is that employees will start asking employers to drop their shitty health care. Then you can go to the exchange. If I were you, I would have your husband lobby his employer to just get rid of their stupid plan.

Having lived through a fairly horrible accident last year, I can say that this doesn't surprise me at all. Almost $100k in medical bills and my insurance company wanted me to pay them back. Assuming I didn't pay for food, mortgage, bills, child care, etc, it would have still taken me almost 2 years to pay them back with my salary. In the end, it was cheaper to pay a lawyer to take care of it than to try to negotiate myself with the medical insurance companies involved. I was fortunate to have some smart friends and acquaintances to help me navigate the system, but the whole time kept thinking of all the people who don't have my support network who would essentially have been screwed as a result of greedy medical insurance companies. Healthcare is a broken concept in the US.

The article didn't really give a comprehensive summary of the study....

What does it mean that medical costs are 'behind' ~60% of bankruptcies? Does that mean medical related debts exist on ~60% That they are the biggest portion? That they are the sole cause for bankruptcy?

A little more context would be nice.

92% had more than $5,000... a little more in depth analysis would be nice, $5,000 floor doesn't tell me much when talking bankruptcy.

I'm currently pregnant. Yesterday I spent over an hour at work crying because of our health insurance. My husband is a diabetic. Even with me going on medicaid for the pregnancy, we still wont be able to afford my husbands health insurance. At this point it's almost smarter for me to quit working so we fall into a income bracket low enough that we can actually get some assistance.